Name: Rebecca Munson

Title: “Nothing if not Critical”: Composition and Credit in Othello

Abstract: The opening of Act One, Scene Three of William Shakespeare’s Othello begins with the Duke of Venice’s assertion that “There is no composition in these news/ To give them credit” (1.3.1-2). Though referring to envoys sent from Cyprus which have just reached him, the Duke appears instead to be discussing what we, the audience, have just witnessed: Brabantio’s outrage over Desdemona’s marriage to Othello. With this ambiguity, the Duke seems to be offering a metadramatic critique of the opening of Shakespeare’s play, a fact which led Joel Altman to conclude that “what Shakespeare was concerned to do in this little scene was to anatomize composition,” specifically what composition might be plausible enough to warrant “credit.” Iago has long been seen to deal in plausibility, and in this way he does not take the perspective of the audience (and the Duke) and judge the credit of a fully-formed composition, but inhabits instead the role of the playwright, who moves from invention to composition through the question of plausibility. This paper examines the inverse of Iago’s process of composition, the other side of the playwright coin, and interrogates Iago’s own claim that he is “nothing if not critical” (2.1.119). First, it considers this notion of criticism and its connection to the various acts of deconstruction (or decomposition) that Iago performs throughout the play. Next, it examines how Iago’s perversion of the elements of comedy makes Othello a tragedy about making a tragedy, a play in which the very avoidablity of the conclusion locates the pathos of the play not in the fact of Desdemona and Othello’s deaths, but in their orchestration. Finally, it concludes by reflecting on what Shakespeare’s decision to locate the acts of both composition and criticism in the figure of Iago might say about his own vexed relationship to the work of playwriting.

 

Rebecca Munson is a second-year Ph.D. student in the Berkeley English Department. She holds a B.A. from Columbia and an M.St. from Oxford. Her Master's work was on the reception and appropriation of Shakespeare during the English civil war. She specializes in Shakespeare and seventeenth-century poetry.